


Finding our way home (and getting lost along the way)

by darkbluebox



Category: IT (Movies - Muschietti), IT - Stephen King
Genre: Canon Compliant, Confessions, Extreme Pining, Fix-It, M/M, Recovery, Temporary Character Death
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-09-28
Updated: 2019-09-28
Packaged: 2020-10-29 14:16:41
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 6,798
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/20797970
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/darkbluebox/pseuds/darkbluebox
Summary: Eddie isn't an expert, but he doesn't think death is supposed to feel like this.It's far too noisy, for one thing.





	Finding our way home (and getting lost along the way)

**Author's Note:**

> Content warnings: canon-typical content, description of injuries, references to suicidal thoughts, drug abuse and alcoholism. Let me know if I've missed anything.
> 
> I wrote the majority of this in an angst-induced haze at 4am with no wifi or access to the film. Fact-checking with canon was difficult, to say the least, so no promises as to accuracy.
> 
> Largely the Muschietti version of canon but with some book references thrown in for fun. Enjoy.

Now Eddie isn’t an expert on these things, but he’s pretty sure he just died.

Considering he spent his whole life paralysed with the fear that one rusty nail or dirty syringe would put him in the ground for good, he takes a moment to applaud himself for how well he’s taking it.

Dying, it turns out, is remarkably easy. It was just like playing snake on his phone back in the day, before phones were complicated enough to handle all those little apps for tracking steps and calorie intake and dosage reminders. Snake was the easiest game in the world, but the problem was that you had to stay focused. You directed the snake up and down across the screen until your mind went numb from the simplicity of it all, and the moment your attention slipped you were dead. Eddie didn’t realise how much of his life was spent on cruise control until it was over. One wrong, impulsive moment of distraction and it was _game over_.

At least he got a good hit in against that _fucking _clown before he went.

Maybe for the first time in his adult life, he had stared down the face of terror itself and chosen to _fight back_. And immediately died for his trouble. He isn’t bitter, not really. For as long as whatever puddle of consciousness he’s wallowing in lasts, he will remember the awful screech It made as his monster-killing spike struck true. He’ll remember the stunned look on Richie’s face as Eddie shook him awake, like Eddie had just hit him with a truck. The moment of sweat and adrenaline and triumph, a matter of seconds that could have lasted forever.

Death isn’t as peaceful as Eddie expected it to be. There’s still the sounds of the cavern, screaming and clattering and a deep, bone-shaking rumbling. A voice calling his name, begging like it’s the end of the world, a voice that sounds like Richie but aged a hundred years in the seconds since Eddie saw him. It’s all muffled, as though he’s shut inside a sound-proof room.

He still has limbs, or at least, his mind is telling him he has. He won’t be surprised if it all turns out to be a hysterical imagining of his crumbling consciousness, because no matter what his mind tells him about his bruised and battered body, he can’t move it for love nor money.

He wishes he has his inhaler, or the remaining mobility to take it. It may be a gazebo, but it’s a damn good one.

Also, he feels kind of… damp?

He worries for a moment about waterborne diseases. Then he remembers he’s dead.

It would be kind of liberating, if it didn’t fucking suck so much.

The sounds of a world about to move on without him grow fainter, the phantom weight of his limbs fading with them. Sensation flows from his reach like a river spilling into the sea while memories slip through his fingers like sand. He tries to hold onto that moment, that one glorious moment of triumph, and Richie’s face, he _really _wants to keep that.

The universe has other plans.

His thoughts slow, and then they stop.

And then.

And then.

A thought that’s in his head but isn’t his.

Or is it?

A voice that’s always been there. He’s never heard it before. He knows it. He doesn’t.

He isn’t anything right now.

The thought.

_You did it._

It seems rude not to reply.

_Yeah, I did. We did. Me and Bev and Richie and Ben and… No, wait, actually, who the fuck are you?_

The next thought isn’t so much clear-cut words, but something more abstract that the specks of dust that once were Eddie struggles to process. Light. Hope. Creation. Love.

It fills him up and consumes him whole. It’s like the deadlights, all-consuming, but opposite. They all knew the devil, had seen him, fought him, killed him. They had never stopped long enough to believe that there was anything on the opposing side but them.

Well, shit.

He’s tired. He’s so, so tired.

A wave of wordless gratitude washes over him, almost big enough to scatter what’s left of him to the endless black ocean. It’s followed by another, and another, endless, blinding waves of gratitude, thanks, joy, love, safe.

If he had eyes he would be crying. It’s so much, too much.

The thing he knows but doesn’t places a hand that doesn’t exist on a shoulder he doesn’t have. It thinks,

_Thirty years ago, a young man was spared who he should not have been spared. It did this. It put his body back together and pushed him back into a world he didn’t belong in. He caused terrible harm._

Something stings him, the memory of a knife-like fire against his skin. The hot shock of blood on his face and hands. The stale smell of cigarettes and rot.

The image of a body tumbling into the muggy green water of Derry barrens. Thrashing. A head breaks the surface. A shitty mullet.

Something in him recoils.

_ Thirty years later, I shall spare a man who should have been spared. _

_Who, me? _Thinks Eddie. Thoughts are still too difficult to hold together. He was just getting comfortable.

_You restored the balance. Now, I shall restore you_.

_Okay. Okay, sure. Great. Uh, what does that mean? And-_

_And-_

_And-_

Memories slip through his fingers like sand.

Now, Eddie isn’t an expert on these sorts of things, but he’s pretty sure he just died.

Death isn’t what Eddie expected it to be. It’s loud, for a start, practically deafening, the rush and roar tearing his thoughts apart. It sounds like…water?

Man, if he hadn’t just died, he would be freaking out right now.

Except he still has a body, he’s pretty sure, arms and legs and everything in-between, and that body is in a lot of pain. He can feel the puncture in his gut like a line of fire coursing through him. Still by no means an expert, but he’s confident that’s not how death is supposed to work.

His eyes blink open.

For a moment he sees nothing but white.

He blinks, and details blunder into view. Grass. Sand. The trickle of water. His wristwatch, an expensive present from his wife two birthdays back, smashed. His hands, flecked with red. The itch of gauze hanging off his cheek.

Eddie isn’t dead.

He tries to move, but his body answers with a cacophony of pain and complaints, as if proving his point.

In the distance, he can see… is that one of the sewer pipes? Oh, gross. Gross, gross, gross. He would have been better off dead. He could have caught anything in there.

A grainy embankment. Something watching him, waves lapping against stubby feet. A… a turtle? Did Derry sewer have turtles? That was weird.

He’s bleeding a lot. It’s making his thoughts all wobbly. It’s making him stupid. Stupid, stupid, stupid.

Moving hurts. Thinking hurts. He blinks, scrunches up his face, forces his gaze upwards.

The sky is a vast expanse of sunset-pink above him, a gentle, reassuring sight he never expected to see again. That’s not so bad.

He lies, and waits, and watches. The sun goes down and the stars come out.

He’s never seen so many stars in his life.

He thinks people come, eventually, and then more people, and then they’re moving him, tugging his body to and fro. He lets them, limply allows himself to be tossed to and fro like driftwood in the sea.

Hours later, he surfaces.

“Holy shit.” He blinks up at the neat white squares of the hospital ceiling. A hospital. He’s never been so happy to see a hospital in his life. “Holy shit!”

His words scratch at his throat and before he can say anything else a fit of coughing takes control of his body with such force that Eddie thinks he’s going to cough up a lung. One hand jerks out, reaching from an inhaler his mind knows it won’t find.

“_Holy shit_ is an understatement.” Miraculously, the familiar plastic weight is pressed into his hand. Eddie takes a deep, steadying breath of chemicals and blinks up at his saviour.

Mike’s familiar features beam back at him. Eddie hasn’t seen him smiling this wide since the legendary rock fight of their childhood.

Eddie tries to push himself upright, but Mike presses a hand to his shoulder, head shaking. Eddie quickly sees why. The slightest movement turns his torso into a howling abyss of pain that no amount of bandages and painkillers can subdue.

He thinks he blacks out for a few seconds.

When the black spots clear from his vision, Mike is shaking his head at him with a mixture of exasperation and fondness, like he can’t quite believe what he’s seeing.

“I would accuse you of making a deal with the devil if we hadn’t just beaten his ass,” he says casually, as though he’s trying to hide the invisible question mark hovering at the end of his sentence.

“The fuck happened, Mikey? I feel like I just went ten rounds with the Bowers gang before having a fridge dropped on my head.” A few fragments of memory shift in his mind, jostling for space like tetratomic plates. Shower curtain. Knife. Pain. “Maybe I did? What the _fuck_.”

Mike straightens, expression guarded. “How much do you remember?”

“I remember gettin’ the bastard. Right in the lights.” A sick grin twists across his face, out of his control. It fades when he remembers what happened next. The sick horror curdling in his stomach as he had looked down to see the terrible, claw-like protrusion that had ripped through his gut. Richie’s face, a mirror image of his own.

Nausea shudders through his body like turbulence through an airplane. Mike sees it in his face, thrusts the plastic bucket by the door into his hands in the nick of time.

Eddie wipes his mouth with the back of his shaking hand, over and over as though he can wipe away the memories with it. “Did we really do it? Did we really kill him this time?”

Mike’s mouth presses into a thin line. “Yeah. We got him.”

Then, in spite of the sick and the bandages, Mike pulls him into a quick, rough hug. “We thought you were gone, man. I haven’t told anyone yet, I couldn’t… I couldn’t believe it until I saw it with my own eyes. I’m gonna start making calls, okay, most of the others left days ago, but I think Richie’s still this side of the state border. You stay right there.”

“What am I gonna do, take a three-week vacation in Honalulu? Have you seen the fuckin’ state of me?”

Mike shakes his head at him happily, phone at his ear as he steps through the door. He can hear the erratic hum of his words through the thin separation, and lulled by the sound, along with the steady blip of the half-a-dozen machines he’s been hooked up to, he falls back to sleep.

Even though his insides still feel like someone took a blender to them and despite his best efforts to persuade the hospital administration against it, he’s discharged a day later. He can tell by the discharging nurse’s calculating gaze that she has him pegged as a painkiller junkie. It makes him want to take her clipboard from her pinched little grip and throw it across the room, because he knows his body and he knows that he’s just barely survived what will hopefully be the worst few days of his life by a long shot and they can’t just expect him to put on a fresh change of dressings every few days and go on with his life. He needs _help_.

The doctors recommend gentle exercise, and despite his frustration he’s nowhere near crazy enough to start ignoring them now. He rediscovers his hometown on shiny new crutches with shiny new eyes. The shadows aren’t as deep as they were and knowing he can turn any corner he wants without the knee-jerk terror of what may be about to leap out at him paints the small town in colours he’s never seen before.

He visits the Derry middle school, his old house, the Barrens, the clubhouse. As soon as he can make it more than a few feet without the crutches, he finds his way down to the old dirt paths of the wilds and retraces the steps of long-ago summertime adventures. As he leaves the greenery and hauls himself back up to the main road, he passes the old kissing bridge. The rickety wooden boards are as scarred as they ever were by decades of juvenile graffiti left by children long grown up.

One scratching catches his eye. The carved-out rivets are not yet weathered by time, the exposed wood still bright and fresh. It’s deeper than the others, as though the carver went over it several times in shaky hand, stubbornly carving in their lasting message.

_R + E_

There’s still flecks of wood-dust at his feet. He kicks at them pensively and is startled from his thoughts as a set of tyres screeches to a stop behind him.

He freezes, hands in the air. It isn’t a cop car, so he can’t really explain the impulse. It’s a swanky, asshole kind of car, the kind of thing that wouldn’t look too out of place on a Hollyrood boulevard. He knows the car. He knows the driver, too.

Richie tumbles from the driver’s seat. He’s as white as a ghost and looking at Eddie as though he _is _one.

“Mike said you were back, that you were down here. I didn’t believe him.” He takes a step forward, and then one back, hand on the roof of his asshole car for support. “Nah. No way, man, I’m not falling for this shit.” He jabs a finger in Eddie’s direction as though expecting him to turn to dust in the face of the accusations. When Eddie remains obstinately present with nothing to offer but a flat look, Richie continues, voice rising louder and higher and closer to hysteria with every word. “You were _dead_! I saw that thing _tear you open_! And the cave was falling in on our heads, the fucking terminator himself couldn’t have survived that shit! I call bullshit!”

“Good to see you too, asshole,” Eddie snaps. “Sit tight while I throw myself through the Derry sewer system a few more times, maybe then I’ll look beaten enough for you.”

“Well if that offer ain’t conclusive proof that you ate the real Eddie and started wearing his skin like a suit, I don’t know what is.”

“Fuck you. And your mom.”

Richie shakes his head. “Fuck. It _is _you.” The way he’s staring, Eddie starts to think the skin-wearing monster thing was only half a joke. Eddie can’t blame him. It’s been that kind of week. “Those were really the last words you went with, huh?”

“Says the guy who called an eldritch nightmare monster a sloppy bitch.”

“We were all under a lot of stress.”

“Performance anxiety?”

“Fuck you.” Richie hasn’t stopped shaking his head. The action is bordering on demented. He looks like he’s about to project one of those computer error screens, 404, system crash, restart required. He’s not even blinking, as though he expects Eddie to disappear the moment that he takes his eyes off him. His eyes skate briefly to the side, and Eddie realises he’s looking at the engraving carved into the wooden fencing behind him.

Eddie follows his line of sight and tuts. “Kids these days. No fuckin’ respect.” He aims a kick at the post, misses, curses, bends over double, wheezing. “Ow.”

In the blink of an eye, Richie has crossed the distance between them. He holds his hands out, flapping them awkwardly around Eddie’s shaky frame as though he can’t figure out what to do with them. Eddie brings his inhaler to his mouth, but before he can take it Richie swats his arm away.

“What are you going to do, breathe the stab wounds away?” he snaps.

“Fuck you.” Everything hurts, and for lack of a better option he leans into Richie, lets him take the brunt of his weight. “With a cactus.”

Richie freezes for a moment, before an arm wraps around his shoulder. “Let’s get you home, buddy.”

Eddie doesn’t ask where home is. He doubts Richie knows either.

He spends the car ride flicking through apps on his phone, which he had thankfully had the good sense _not _to take into Derry’s sewer system with him. There are a few messages from the firm that he deletes without reading. A week-old passive-aggressive reminder from one of his cousins that it’s his turn to host for Thanksgiving, which doesn’t strike as much terror into his heart as a murderous clown did but comes pretty close. Nothing from his wife.

As though reading his mind, Eddie says, “Shit. We told everyone on Facebook that you were dead.”

“Nice going, genius,” Eddie mutters. His finger hovers over the _call _button, wondering how to begin the mother of all awkward conversations without causing cardiac arrest on either end of the line. He could always blame it on a bad prank. That was never far from the truth when Richie was involved.

He glanced at Richie, who was drumming his fingers against the wheel as he drove, his tapping matching the erratic rhythm in Eddie’s chest. He dropped the phone back into his lap and let his head fall against the car window with a sigh.

“I can pretend not to listen,” says Richie when he sees the phone in Eddie’s lap. “I can stick my fingers in my ears.” He does so, and the car veers dangerously close to the kerb.

“Knock it off,” Eddie snaps, grabbing the wheel with one hand until Richie has finished his bit. When he’s done and back in control of the wheel, Eddie presses his head back against the window, ignoring the juddering that the movement of the car sends throbbing through his skull. “I didn’t think of any of them, not once, you know? Pretty fuckin’ sad, if you ask me.”

“What were you thinking of? As you were, you know…” Richie drew a line across his throat, accompanied by exaggerated choking noises. Eddie doesn’t answer immediately, which Richie takes as a prompt to continue. “This one time, I took too much of something at this janky basement rave, spent four hours squatting in a toilet stall _convinced _I was about to kick it. The whole time all I could think about was hot pockets. Don’t know if that was the drugs or the dying, haven’t been able to stomach them since.”

“Drugs or hot pockets?”

“That question doesn’t even deserve an answer.”

“Right.” Eddie tried to throw his mind back to the minutes and hours following the showdown, but it was like wading through mud. “I think I remember…I was thinking of you when I died.”

The car swerved wildly. Eddie braced himself against the door as a chorus of car horns blared around them.

“Jesus shitting Christ!” Richie wrenched the car back into their lane. “Buy a guy a drink first, why don’t you?”

“Alright! God, calm down, it’s not my fault you were all up in my face. Of course I was going to think about you, you were the last thing I saw.”

Richie lets out a long, unsteady breath. “Right. Yeah, right, of course.”

Eddie lets out a similar breath. His palms are sweating the way they used to when he was hiding something from his mom. He clenches his hands into fists, trying to figure out why he feels like he’s lying. His train of thought keeps running into brick walls and derailing itself. Maybe it’s the painkillers.

Against his best intentions, he dozes off in Richie’s car. When he comes to, he’s alone in the Derry Inn carpark. His room is as he left it, minus the evidence of a knife fight in the ensuite.

He calls his wife. She doesn’t see the joke. She tells him as such, loudly, extensively, and unreservedly.

She’s packed her bags, she tells him. The newspaper has been cancelled. There’s a little milk left in the fridge, but it’ll probably be sour by the time he returns. If he returns.

It’s a surprisingly simple end to the longest relationship he’s ever been in. He heaves a sigh when he hangs up the phone like it’s his first breath of real fresh air in decades.

Instead of going through each and every distant relative in his phonebook, he makes a facebook status update: _I’m not dead, long story, shitty prank. Please stop making commemoration posts. My laugh didn’t light up the fucking room, and the next person who says it did will be hearing from my lawyer._

He shuts off his phone and throws it down on his bed, mourns the opportunity to run away to another country with nothing but a fake name and the loose change in his wallet. It isn’t a new fantasy, only dashed in previous years by his mistrust of any water filtration system outside of the U.S..

Richie is sitting at the bar when he comes downstairs, staring into a glass of something amber like he’s looking for answers to the mysteries of the universe at the bottom.

“Mike said he was going to start clearing out his clown-stalking loft today. I’m going to go lend a hand,” Eddie says in response to a question that was never asked. He’s so used to justifying every action and movement to _someone_ in his life that it feels weird not explaining himself, like he needs permission to leave, even if it comes from Richie, of all people. “How much longer are you in town?”

Richie looks at him as though the thought of his departure had yet to occur to him. His gaze isn’t particularly focused.

“Nevermind,” Eddie mutters. He reaches the door, swings back around, returns for the car keys that Richie is already holding out for him. “Thanks, asshole.”

The last thing he hears before the door swings shut behind him is Richie’s snort.

Eddie has never gone for Richie’s kind of car, too flash, too fast, too likely to cause trouble, but he can’t help but let the engine rev a little as he speeds towards the town library. His chest stings as he pulls himself up the stairs to Mike’s loft, but he’s rewarded by a warm smile and a herbal tea at the top which Mike swears up and down isn’t spiked with any freaky hallucinogenic shit.

Eddie eyes Mike dubiously over the rim of the chipped mug but sips regardless.

“You talk to Richie?” Mike asks. He’s tearing great strips of research away from his wall like old wallpaper. An intricate map of the Derry sewers flutters to the floor in pieces, another bad memory falling into obscurity.

“He nearly killed me all over again with his car about three times today. Yeah, I talked to him. Phoned the others as well. Bev and Ben, huh? Who would have seen that coming?”

“Literally anyone with a pair of eyes.” Mike shakes his head as he dumps an armful of scraps into the basket before him.

“Really? I never notice that kind of thing.”

Mike stops, eyeing him, his hands on his hips. “Uhuh.”

“Maybe I was too busy getting different parts of my body sliced open by lunatics and murderers to worry about who was getting it on with who. You know how it is.”

“Right.” Mike still hasn’t moved. His gaze is something bordering on exasperated, and for some reason it’s pushing Eddie’s shortening temper to the edge. “Richie was really cut up, you know. When we lost you.”

“Great. Thanks for that.” Eddie sets the tea down. His mind automatically tries to fill in the gaps of the picture Mike is painting, and the resulting image burns a little too painfully to focus on. He doesn’t want to think about the shit he put everyone else through. He isn’t even over the shit he went through himself.

“I mean it.” Mike approaches, perching on the edge of the workbench beside him. “He wouldn’t leave. The cave was crashing down around us, and you were… you were gone, Eddie, I still can’t explain how you came back from that, but… he wouldn’t let go. All the way back up those caves and out the house he was fighting us. Trying to get back to you, even if it was the last thing he ever did.”

Eddie’s face screws up without his permission. “Shut up, Mike. I don’t want to hear this.”

“Why not?”

“I don’t want to think about anything that happened down there again until I die. Or after. Just never, period. Now, are we burning this crap or what?”

Mike’s gaze stays on him a beat too long before he blinks. “Yeah. We are.”

The photocopied newspaper headlines and missing child posters curl up and turn black in the bottom of the bucket. The two of them stand and watch until nothing but the ashes remain.

The smell of smoke clings to Eddie’s clothes all the way back to the inn.

Richie’s at the bar where Eddie left him with a blossoming collection of empty glasses beside him. There’s no staff there to serve the drinks, but why would little things like legality or social etiquette get in Richie’s way? It’s certainly not keeping him from giving up on drinking from glasses. Eddie watches with undisguised disgust as Richie raises a brown bottle of something eye-wateringly expensive and takes a swig, unsteady hand causing the contents to swish violently against the glass.

“You make that face too long and you’ll be stuck with it forever,” Richie says without turning. Eddie catches his eye in the reflection of the bottles lining the wall before them.

“You stink,” Eddie says, pushing himself up on the stool beside him. It’s just an inch past too tall for him, and Richie’s smirk tells him he noticed the little tiptoe-hoisting routine to push himself up. Asshole.

“Your mom stinks.”

“Been sitting on that one a while, have you? You should open with it at your next show.”

“Shut up.” Richie pushes the bottle towards him. Eddie leans over the bar to grab a clean glass, he’s not an _animal_, and the usual mantra of germ risks is rattling off in the back of his mind, and the slick of the bar isn’t as stable to lean on as Eddie thought it would be because he’s tipping forwards, oh shit-

Richie grabs Eddie’s arm and pulls him back before he can fall face-first over the bar. He snorts, his hand a heavy and reassuring weight on Eddie’s arm. “Now who’s drunk, stinky?”

“I never said you were drunk!”

“But it was in your _eyes_.” Richie waggles his fingers at him in what Eddie can only guess is an impression of a drunk wizard.

Eddie screws his eyes shut, thinks _fuck it_, and gulps down a mouthful of something sweet and heavy straight from the bottle. Then he grimaces, because God, that was _not _meant to be drunk straight. “What else is in my eyes, then?”

“Fear.”

“No shit. I’m afraid of everything. What the hell is this?” He’s about to start examining the label when Richie takes the bottle from his hands for another mouthful. “It’s getting charged to your room.”

“Nah,” Richie says when he’s finished. “This is a new kind of fear.”

Eddie squints at him. He saw Richie drunk at the Chinese joint, or tipsy at least, and he had just been the same Richie as before but louder. He’s not sure what to make of this mood, if that’s even the word for it. It’s eerily sincere, contemplative. As though the big TV personality has just been turned off like a light switch. He can’t really think of a time Richie wasn’t performing as though his friends were an audience to his daily stand-up special. The Richie before him is for his eyes only, and it feels like a privilege, if an uncomfortable one. Eddie suddenly can’t decide what to do with his hands. He tries drumming his fingers on the bar, then clasping them in his lap, before giving up entirely and sitting on them. He can still feel the compression where Richie grasped his arm.

“Well. I just realised that I have the rest of my life in front of me again. And not the first fuckin’ clue what to do with it.” He grabs the bottle back from Richie. The aftertaste is growing on him. “My wife left me.”

Richie snorts. Eddie hits him on the arm. Hard.

“What? Face it, Eddie, you’re not even upset.”

“I’m upset that I blew fifteen years of my life on a relationship I hated.”

“Fifteen years? That’s _nothing_.” Richie takes the bottle Eddie was holding out for him. “I’ve been in love with the same guy since I was twelve. Now _that_’s a waste of time.” This time, he doesn’t stop after one mouthful; he leaves the bottle pressed to his lips and chugs.

“Jesus.” Eddie snatches the bottle back and puts it at the end of the bar, out of his reach. “Are you trying to die?”

“Not anymore,” Richie says flatly. He doesn’t seem to register the hard line of Eddie’s lips, the sudden drop of the atmosphere. He swallows before continuing, “things got a little hairy around the mid-nineties. And the noughties. All good now. I have pills. The boring kind _and _the fun kind.”

“I’m sorry,” says Eddie, “about that and about the guy.” He wonders idly if it was someone he knew. He couldn’t remember Richie spending much time with anyone outside of the losers – friendly contact with any of them was seen throughout the school as a sick form of social suicide – but he did have a knack for latching onto anyone at the arcade who would go for a round of _Centipede _with him. His sacrifice had been an arcade token, too.

“Yeah, my life is just one long tragi-comedy, and I’m still waiting on the punchline.” Richie sends the confiscated bottle a forlorn look and starts checking the glasses in front of him for residual alcohol. “I went back up to the kissing bridge, actually, the day after… you know. I’d carved the initials in as a kid, like some kind of… wish, prayer, ritual, I dunno. Not that it gave me anything but splinters for my trouble. Anyway, I went back, went over the letters ‘cuz they were fading into the woodwork and I… I didn’t want to lose it. Him. The memories. Not again.” Richie’s head sinks down to meet the bar with a dull thud, as though whatever string holding his body upright has just been cut. Eddie pats him between the shoulder blades, shaking his head.

“Sounds pretty fuckin’ romantic if you ask me.” His hand comes to a stop, resting on Richie’s back as half a memory flashes before his eyes. Fresh wood shavings trodden into damp gravel.

It’s the end of a thread of thought he can’t quite grasp, and so he lets it go.

The next morning – _late_ the next morning – they leave their keys at the vacant check-in desk (seriously, where _are _the staff in this place?) and Riche chucks his duffel into the boot of his car before joining Eddie as he waits for his taxi.

“I could have given you a lift.” The previous night’s drinking is written into the bags under Richie’s eyes.

“We’re going different ways,” Eddie says. Mike had stopped by earlier to wish them well and the weird, sad expression he wore as he glanced between the two of them had pushed Eddie’s frayed mental state into a place far too difficult to handle at that time of the morning.

“I guess so.” Richie watches blankly as the dusty yellow taxi pulls up to the sidewalk. “It’s been real, Eddie-Spaghetti.”

“Call me that again and I’ll lacerate you.” Eddie’s never been one for physical contact, but when he sees Richie standing there, dishevelled and windswept like a leaf waiting to be blown where the wind takes him, something inside him he long believed had been squished into nothingness takes over. He leans forward and pulls Richie into a hug. Richie wobbles like he’s forgotten how to use his limbs but manages a reciprocal squeeze before Eddie relinquishes him. “Yeah. So. Bye.”

The taxi driver is squinting at him as if he’s wondering if Eddie is worth the trouble, so Eddie throws his case into the trunk before he can change his mind and climbs into the backseat.

He waves to Richie as the cab pulls away and Richie waves back, tentative, confused, like he’s not sure it’s really Eddie he’s saying goodbye to.

It’s a long drive to the nearest airport. Eddie pops a heavy-duty anti-travel sickness pill and prepares to spend the next few hours unconscious, when the familiar wooden posts of Derry’s kissing bridge roll past his window.

Something slots into place.

Eddie jerks upright in his seat like someone just attached electric cables to his spine. “Wait! Stop, pull over!”

The driver does so, glancing at Eddie via the rear-view mirror as though calculating how likely it is that he’s about to get mugged. Eddie jumps from the backseat like the car’s on fire, leaves the door hanging open behind him as he marches towards the one engraving caringly saved from obscurity.

_R + E_

Well. That’s a lot to process.

He almost drops his phone in his rush to get it out of his pocket. It rings for an eternity before going to voicemail. Eddie scowls and hits _redial_.

_Hey, this is Richie, leave a message. Or don’t. I don’t run your life_!

“Hey, asshole, I know your penis-compensation of a car has Bluetooth, so pick up now or I swear to God-!”

There’s a click on the other end of the line. “Uh, yeah, Eddie?” His words are set to the hum of traffic, occasionally interspersed with aggressive honking. “I know you miss me already and all, but you could at least try playing hard to get.”

“Who’s E?”

There’s another blare of horns. “What?”

“I’m standing on the kissing bridge right now. Who’s E?”

“Clint fucking Eastwood. What the hell are you doing, Eddie?”

“Wherever the hell you are, just turn the car around and get back here. Now.” Eddie wishes he still had one of those flip phones. He could really go for snapping one shut right now. He settles for stabbing the end call button before turning back to the taxi. The driver is standing by the car, smoking.

He nods knowingly at Eddie through the haze of smoke. “The scruffy one with the glasses?”

Eddie nods.

“Called it.”

When Eddie hands him the fare, he waits for his change.

Ten minutes later, Richie rolls up to the bridge, tyres lining up perfectly with the marks he left days prior. He clambers from the driver’s seat with the face of a man expecting to meet a firing squad.

“Long time, no see,” he says with a queasy smile.

Eddie folds his arms. “Were you ever going to tell me?”

“About my graphic Clint Eastwood sex dreams? No, I was not.”

“Shut the fuck up, Richie.” Eddie stalks forward. Richie hops back until his back is pressed against the car. “You were just going to let me drive off into the sunset without _telling _me. Seriously, how can you…why would you…?” The questions fall to pieces in his throat and stutter from his mouth like they’re coming from a record player with a broken needle. In the ten minutes it took Richie to arrive, Eddie got no closer to figuring out exactly why he’s as furious as he is, but that isn’t going to stop him from tearing his best friend a new one. “Since we were twelve, Richie. _Twelve_.”

Richie’s smile looks like it’s made of hastily sewn-together scraps, but Eddie can see the seams running through the frown lines in his skin. “I don’t know what the fuck you’re talking about.”

Eddie lets out a sharp breath that whistles through his teeth like a hiss. “Enough, Richie.”

Eddie presses closer, staring Richie down like they’re in some kind of stand-off. He’s a few decades past standing on his tiptoes to make a point, but Richie’s unwilling slouch against the car puts them on eye-level.

Richie’s the first to blink. He screws his eyes shut, head swinging downwards. “I’m sorry. I couldn’t… I’m sorry.” He brings up his arm like it’s his last line of defence and presses his hand to his face.

In the blink of an eye, Eddie’s anger evaporates. “Hey. Hey, c’mon, man, don’t…” He tugs at Richie’s arm but Richie flinches from the touch like it’s fire against his skin.

“I tried. I tried not to feel like this, I tried so fuckin’ hard…”

“What? No, Richie, no, that’s not why I’m mad. Was mad.” He tugs harder this time, pulls the hand away until Richie is forced to meet his eyes. “I’m just pissed that you weren’t gonna tell me.”

Richie muttered something that ended with “-uncomfortable.”

“I don’t give a shit. We’re friends. We share this stuff. And frankly I would have appreciated the boost to my ego.”

Richie snorts bitterly. “Sharing. Fine. You want to do some fuckin’ sharing?”

Eddie should be more worried by his tone, but right now he’s beyond caring. “You bet your fat fuckin’ _tits _I do.”

“Fine!” Richie snaps, and all at once it’s like watching a dam burst. “You, Eddie Kaspbrak, are a neurotic, childish, self-obsessed, germophobic coward and the worst example of Freudian theory since Oedipus himself. You’re a petty, snarky, self-righteous bastard and I’ve been in love with you longer than I can remember. Are you happy now?!”

There’s a pause as the words sink in. “Yes!” Eddie’s reply bounces from his chest of its own accord, and suddenly he finds fire of his own, enough to match Richie’s and more. “Yes, you hyperactive, self-absorbed, deceptive prick, I am fucking _delighted_.”

“Fine!”

“Fine!”

A long pause. Both their chests are heaving breathlessly. At some point during his tantrum Eddie had grabbed Richie by his collar; he now relinquishes his grip, and guiltily smooths the crease from the shirt. Richie’s face is three shades redder than it was built to be, and Eddie worries that one more word and he’ll explode like an over-inflated cartoon tyre. He blinks once, twice, and asks, “you are?”

“What?”

“Delighted.”

And against all expectation, common sense and self-preservation, Eddie realises that he is. “Yeah. Actually, yeah.”

He steps back. Richie slouches forward like he’s taking his first breath of air since he got out of the car. He glances up in time to see Eddie climb into the passenger seat and kick up his feet on the dashboard. He stares for a moment, and again it’s that look like he isn’t sure who Eddie is anymore, before sliding into the driver’s seat after him.

“Feet off the dashboard.” Richie says in a snooty, bad English accent. Eddie gives him a look and Richie shakes his head. “Just kidding.”

They sit in silence. On the other side of the bridge, a deer pokes its head from the surrounding foliage. It eyes them for several seconds, unblinking, before picking its way across the bridge and slipping into the cover of the trees on the other side. Richie coughs. “So. Uh. Where are we going?”

Eddie turns to him, looks Richie up and down from the scuffed toes of his sneakers to the mop of permanent bed hair shaking across his forehead. The answer comes easier to him than anything ever has. “We’re going wherever the hell we want.”

Richie smiles back. It starts small and grows like a wildflower in the rain until all his face is a field of light and colour. He kicks the car into gear and with a roar of engines they tear through Derry and away into the unknown.

As they cross the county border, Eddie winds down the window and flicks his inhaler through it like a cigarette butt. He doesn’t look back for the clatter of plastic hitting the ground but looks to the man at his side instead.

For the first time in his life, he isn’t afraid of anything.

**Author's Note:**

> I've known how It ends for about a decade now but I still Wasn’t Ready. 
> 
> Come talk to me about it [on tumblr.](https://darkblueboxs.tumblr.com)
> 
> Thanks for reading, please let me know what you thought!


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